Scientists Twist Light to Send Data FAST

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/newsroom/news_release.php?id=2762


"A multinational team led by USC with researchers in the U.S., China, Pakistan, and Israel has developed a system of transmitting data using twisted beams of light at ultra-high speeds — up to 2.56 terabits per second. Broadband cable supports up to about 30 megabits per second. The twisted-light system transmits about 85,000 times more data per second."


Wow.

Lightning Electrolaser

An old weapon from science fiction posits a hand-held laser used to ionize the air, then firing an electric charge down the ionized path to the target: the "electrolaser." While prototypes have been around for a while, this one guides a lightning bolt to the target...and you don't even have to be all that accurate, since the bolt will automatically deviate to the target, assuming it has a lower resistance:

http://www.army.mil/article/82262/Picatinny_engineers_set_phasers_to__fry_/

Ultra-Efficient Solar Panels

Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels.

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/427673/ultra-efficient-solar/

And thin film solar panels get even thinner:

http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-cao-thin/

This is in line with Kurzweil's predictions:

http://www.psfk.com/2011/02/kurzweil-predicts-100-solar-power-in-20-years.html

A Computer is Replacing Wikipedia

A computer program can now gather articles from the Web and create its own encyclopedia, no human input required:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428333/an-online-encyclopedia-that-writes-itself/

It makes mistakes, true...but how far can it be before it makes fewer mistakes than humans?

Nanoscale printers may bypass nano factories

Cheap and impressive:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/nanoscale-printers-may-bypass-factories?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=fc17fb2a0c-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

Approaching the speed of the human brain

From Mark Poole:

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We are approaching the capability of human brain in one machine. Kurzweil estimated that at 20 petaflops (he also guestimated that it would occur in supercomputers by 2010).

Sequoia's capabilities are measured at 16.3 petaflops 

 

http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/technology/hardware/faster-than-a-speeding-petaflop-1.1323685#.T-IVFrVYvwk 

What is also holding true is the exponential decrease in the cost per computing cycle, see below:

What cost $8 trillion in 1961 costs a buck 80, 50 years later.

Fantastic!

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Hardware costs (from Wiki)

The following is a list of examples of computers that demonstrates how drastically performance has increased and price has decreased. The "cost per GFLOPS" is the cost for a set of hardware that would theoretically operate at one billion floating-point operations per second. During the era when no single computing platform was able to achieve one GFLOPS, this table lists the total cost for multiple instances of a fast computing platform which speed sums to one GFLOPS. Otherwise, the least expensive computing platform able to achieve one GFLOPS is listed.

Date	Approximate cost per GFLOPS	Approximate cost per GFLOPS inflation adjusted to 2011 dollars[41]	Technology	Comments
1961	US $1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion)	US $8.3 trillion	About 17 million IBM 1620 units costing $64,000 each	The 1620's multiplication operation takes 17.7 ms.[42]
1984	$15,000,000	$33,000,000	Cray X-MP
1997	$30,000	$42,000	Two 16-processor Beowulf clusters with Pentium Promicroprocessors[43]
April 2000	$1,000	$1,300	Bunyip Beowulf cluster	Bunyip was the first sub-US$1/MFLOPS computing technology. It won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2000.
May 2000	$640	$836	KLAT2	KLAT2 was the first computing technology which scaled to large applications while staying under US$1/MFLOPS.[44]
August 2003	$82	$100	KASY0	KASY0 was the first sub-US$100/GFLOPS computing technology.[45]
August 2007	$48	$52	Microwulf	As of August 2007, this 26.25 GFLOPS "personal" Beowulf cluster can be built for $1256.[46]
March 2011	$1.80	$1.80	HPU4Science	This $30,000 cluster was built using only commercially available "gamer" grade hardware.[47]

New DARPA program may accelerate synthetic biology path to advanced nanotechnology

Nice to see DARPA get into this:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=5172

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology

Very cool tool enabling augmented reality:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html